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A Renowned Horror Author

The Summer People by a master of suspense

I read this narrative some time back and it has haunted me since then. The titular “summer people” turn out to be the Allisons from New York, who rent an identical off-grid rural cabin annually. During this visit, instead of going back home, they opt to extend their holiday for a month longer – a decision that to alarm everyone in the surrounding community. Each repeats a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed in the area beyond the holiday. Nonetheless, the couple are determined to not leave, and at that point things start to become stranger. The man who brings fuel won’t sell to them. Nobody agrees to bring supplies to the cabin, and when the family try to drive into town, their vehicle refuses to operate. A tempest builds, the energy in the radio die, and with the arrival of dusk, “the aged individuals huddled together in their summer cottage and expected”. What might be the Allisons waiting for? What do the townspeople understand? Every time I revisit Jackson’s disturbing and influential story, I’m reminded that the top terror stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

An Eerie Story by a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple travel to an ordinary beach community in which chimes sound constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and unexplainable. The first truly frightening scene occurs after dark, when they opt to go for a stroll and they fail to see the sea. There’s sand, the scent exists of decaying seafood and brine, surf is audible, but the water appears spectral, or something else and more dreadful. It’s just profoundly ominous and whenever I go to a beach after dark I think about this story which spoiled the sea at night to my mind – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – return to the inn and discover why the bells ring, during a prolonged scene of confinement, necro-orgy and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre bedlam. It’s an unnerving meditation about longing and decay, two bodies aging together as a couple, the connection and violence and affection within wedlock.

Not just the scariest, but perhaps one of the best brief tales available, and an individual preference. I read it in the Spanish language, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be released in this country several years back.

A Prominent Novelist

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I read this narrative near the water in the French countryside a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I felt cold creep through me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I had hit a block. I didn’t know if it was possible a proper method to craft certain terrifying elements the book contains. Reading Zombie, I saw that there was a way.

First printed in the nineties, the novel is a grim journey within the psyche of a criminal, the protagonist, based on an infamous individual, the serial killer who slaughtered and cut apart numerous individuals in a city between 1978 and 1991. Infamously, Dahmer was fixated with making a zombie sex slave who would stay with him and attempted numerous macabre trials to do so.

The deeds the story tells are horrific, but equally frightening is its own mental realism. Quentin P’s awful, shattered existence is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. The reader is sunk deep caught in his thoughts, compelled to observe thoughts and actions that appal. The foreignness of his thinking resembles a bodily jolt – or finding oneself isolated in an empty realm. Starting this story feels different from reading than a full body experience. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

During my youth, I was a somnambulist and eventually began having night terrors. On one occasion, the fear featured a nightmare where I was confined within an enclosure and, as I roused, I discovered that I had torn off a part from the window, trying to get out. That building was falling apart; during heavy rain the ground floor corridor flooded, insect eggs dropped from above onto the bed, and at one time a big rodent ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

When a friend presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building high on the Dover cliffs felt familiar to myself, longing as I felt. It is a story concerning a ghostly clamorous, emotional house and a girl who ingests chalk from the cliffs. I loved the book deeply and went back frequently to the story, each time discovering {something